Falling felt a lot like getting flushed down an industrial waste pipe, except with more exposed rebar and significantly worse smells. I landed boots-first on something squishy, rolled across a grating slick with phosphorescent slime, and immediately raised both scrap-welded six-shooters. My boots sank three inches into pulsing, fibrous moss. Above us, the ceiling was a jagged mouth of broken concrete. Around us, the lower maintenance tier of Sector Nine had been turned into a wet, pulsing cavern. “Nia?” I called out, my throat tight. “Kiddo, sound off. If you broke a leg, I’m docking your allowance.” “Land... landed on a heap of old filters,” Nia wheezed from ten yards away. “Smells like rotten cabbage, Kass. I’m fine.” I exhaled sharply, pointing my guns toward the dark. Zadira Kosh was already upright, her sniper rifle raised to her cheek, scanning the dripping fog. Her face remained carved from basalt. “Containment breach depth: four hundred meters,” Zadira said flatly. “We are below the civilian drainage lines. This entire tier is an incubator.” [ *Alert: Ambient atmospheric toxicity at 42%. Tip: Breathing is generally considered a bad tactical habit down here.* ] [ *Skill Unlocked: Umu-Shadow Weaving (Tier 1). You have a spare soul lingering in your bootlaces. Put it to work, deadbeat.* ] “Don't mind if I do,” I muttered. I aimed my left revolver down at my own boots and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. The hammer struck spent brass. A spark flared. My shadow peeled away from the floor like black molasses. It rose, shuddering, shaping itself into a quadruped nightmare with needle-thin limbs, three hollow eye-slits glowing violet, and a mouth that opened like a split leather purse. It let out a soft, wet chirp. “What in the gods' names is that abominable thing?” Zadira whispered, her rifle twitching toward it. “Meet Lurk,” I said, grinning with far more teeth than I actually felt comfortable showing. “He fetches things. He spots things. He doesn't shed on the furniture. Lurk, go dig up some brass. Daddy’s running low on lead.” Lurk melted into the fog with a sickening slither, returning three seconds later with two dented magazines of high-caliber military rounds clamped in his maw. He dropped them at my boots and vanished right back into my shadow, leaving behind only the faintest violet rim along the edge of my coat. “See? Man's best friend. Unpaid intern edition.” Behind me, Nia doubled over. A violent, hacking fit tore through her chest. She clamped both hands over her mouth, but it wasn't enough. When she pulled them away, her palms were smeared with thick, iridescent emerald bile. The joke died in my mouth. A cold fist closed around my windpipe. The gray fungal veins on her forearm had crawled another inch toward her collarbone since this morning. “Hey,” I said, bounding over and dropping to one knee beside her. My hands shook as I reached out, hovering over her shoulders before pulling her hood snug against the damp air. “Hey, none of that. You’re ruining the aesthetic. Green is totally last cycle’s color. We’re doing burnt umber this season.” Nia wiped her chin on her sleeve, giving me a trembling, pale smile. “You’re an idiot, Kass.” “I’m a visionary with terrible taste. There’s a difference.” I forced a smirk onto my face, forcing the tremor out of my voice. “We get down to the docks. We commandeer a boat the size of an orbital station. We cross the drink, grab the spore-scrubber from the aliens, and then I buy you that silk tunic with the gold fringes from the Upper Ziggurat bazaars. Deal?” “Deal,” she whispered, leaning against an iron pillar. Zadira didn’t look at either of us. She kept her scope sweeping the gloom. “Her pulmonary lining is decaying. You have perhaps three days before the spores compromise her nervous system entirely.” “Thanks, Doctor Sunshine,” I snapped, standing up and thumbing the fresh rounds into my chambers. “Appreciate the bedside manner.” “I deal in facts,” Zadira replied, stepping over a thick root of alien sinew that pulsed with milky fluid. “Just as it is a fact that we are passing an outpost supply cache. Sector Nine forward redoubt. This way.” We picked our way through the hanging tendrils of mold. The silence of the ruins was worse than the gunfire—a wet, suffocating hush interrupted only by water dripping onto corroded sheet metal. “Why were you in my sector anyway, sniper?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “Garrison elites don't slum it in the rusted gutters unless they're running from someone or hunting someone.” “Hunting,” she said, her tone devoid of warmth. “Commander Belsazar. He had orders to evacuate the 4th Heavy Cohort when the initial spore-storm hit the middle terraces. Instead, he locked the bulkheads behind him. Trapped four hundred recruits in the kill-zone. Took the division’s heavy armory and vanished into the lower sublevels.” “Charming guy. Sounds like middle management material.” “He was my commanding officer,” she said. The edge in her voice could have sheared tungsten. “And he will die by my rifle.” “Fair enough. Everyone needs a hobby.” We turned a corner into a vaulted reinforced bunker. The blast door had been blasted inward, crumpled like foil. Inside lay the shattered remnants of an armory—racks of rifles rusted into iron oxide by alien enzymes, crushed munitions crates, and a scattering of corpses clad in heavy composite carapace armor. Most were picked clean of meat. But in the center sat an intact automated weapon station: a twin-linked autocannon, forty millimeters of belt-fed fury, still bolted to an armored gimbal. Beside it lay the decapitated husk of a shock trooper juggernaut, thick armor plates fused to a massive, rotting frame. My fingers twitched. [ *Recipe Discovered: Heavy Siege Chassis (Makeshift).* ] [ *Components: 1x Headless Heavy Corpse, 1x Twin-Linked Autocannon, 12x Spent 40mm Casings.* ] [ *Would you like to assemble? Note: Subtlety will decrease by 99%. Noise complaints guaranteed.* ] “Oh, mama,” I breathed. I dumped a handful of brass casings into the corpse’s open neck cavity. I reached down, pressing my necrotic-etched knuckles against the breastplate, and channeled the cold, black hum simmering beneath my ribs. Black lightning cracked across the metal. The corpse surged upright with a violent hydraulic hiss. Tendrils of gloom erupted from the neck, snaking out to wrap around the heavy gun, yanking it free from its floor mount and welding it directly into the right socket of the dead juggernaut. The dead soldier stood seven feet tall, hunched beneath the massive twin barrels, its left hand a massive pneumatic claw. Zadira lowered her rifle, staring. Her mouth tightened into a thin, incredulous line. “That is completely unhygienic. And entirely against High Directorate military protocol.” “Protocol didn't keep him alive, sweetheart,” I said, patting the metal shoulder of my new heavy gunner. “I'm calling him Lugnut. Lugnut, say hello to the nice lady.” Lugnut’s twin barrels spun half a turn with a terrifying mechanical clatter. Nia let out a soft laugh from a rusted crate, though she clutched her ribs right after. “He’s hideous, Kass.” “He has an inner beauty, Nia. It's measured in rounds per minute.” Zadira walked past the automaton, ignoring my triumph, and kicked aside a pile of moldy ration tins near an overturned terminal. She picked up a cracked tactical recorder. She wiped the fungal slime off its glass screen and pressed playback. Static hissed through the speaker, followed by a rasping, wet voice. *“—the central high council is dead. Akkadia Prime is already digested from the roots up. The things in the mist... they offered terms. Life. Evolution. I will not die in a tin can for a dying ziggurat. I gave them the lower gate codes. They gave me... the nectar. The sovereign blood. Let the slums burn.*” The audio ended in a sickening wet choke. Zadira’s knuckles were white against her rifle grip. “He didn't just flee. He opened the doors for them.” A low, thunderous vibration shook the concrete deck under our boots. The fog at the far end of the armory began to churn. Something colossal stepped out from the darkness, tearing through heavy structural iron like it was dry paper. The upper torso belonged to a man clad in gilded enforcer plates, but his ribs were split open, weeping thick purple sap. His lower half was a monstrous, four-legged mass of segmented chitin and twitching, fibrous muscle—a centaur born from a nightmare. His face was half-human, half-calcified shell, his single milky eye fixing onto Zadira. “Enforcer Kosh,” the thing rumbled, its voice vibrating through the soles of our boots. “You are late for muster.” Clutched in his mutated, clawed hand was a glowing, pressurized glass canister filled with luminescent silver fluid—the crest of the high citadel stamped on the cap, pulsing against the toxic dark. Anti-spore serum.

Echoes in the Fog